Eurovision has faced political boycotts before – how does the latest compare? | Eurovision

The decision by four European broadcasters to boycott next year’s Eurovision due to Israel’s participation is undoubtedly a turning point in the song contest’s 70-year history.

One of the few truly popular, non-elitist and pan-European cultural events to be held without Spain, one of the “big five” countries in terms of financial contributions; Ireland won the competition more than any other country bar Sweden; The Netherlands became a founding member in 1956; and Slovenia, a symbol of the EU’s eastward expansion.

With only a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza and Israel’s broadcaster KAN showing no signs of withdrawing voluntarily, this could continue to be the case for some time.

At the same time, political boycotts are nothing new for the world’s biggest live music event, no matter what its organizers say about the contest’s supposedly apolitical nature.

“Greece and Turkey boycotted the event in 1975 and 1976 respectively due to Türkiye’s invasion of Cyprus,” said cultural historian Paul Jordan, who was on the international jury of the 2019 Eurovision French National Selection. Armenia refused to participate in the event held in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2012.

Ironically, the target of the first boycott call in the competition’s history was broadcaster RTVE’s Spain, which was the most outspoken of the four boycotters. A young Danish leftist activist at the ninth edition of Eurovision in Copenhagen in 1964 stormed the stage He carried a banner that read “Boycott Franco and Salazar” to protest Spain and Portugal being allowed to compete despite being ruled by military dictatorships.

Spain won Eurovision in 1968 and hosted the 1969 contest. The contest was boycotted by Austria in protest against the Franco regime; Austria will be the host country in 2026 and is currently one of the countries most scandalized by the boycott by the separatist quartet.

You could say that all this means Spain’s activist stance smacks of hypocrisy, or you could say that the country is in a stronger position to peer through the dry fog and shine and see what Eurovision is really about.

“Spain entered Eurovision at a time when it was blocked from joining the European Economic Community; it was about ending exclusion and entering an elite club,” said Duncan Wheeler, head of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds. “His background in Eurovision made him acutely aware of how pop culture can function as a soft power.”

Given the “Euro” in the title, some will ask what right Israel has to take first place in the song contest. This would be to misunderstand the origins of Eurovision, which was never conceived as a top-down tool for building a common European culture, but as a rather banal experiment in cross-border broadcasting that took on political significance almost by accident.

One oft-overlooked facts is that not only Israel, but also other North African and Middle Eastern countries such as Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia are full members of the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the show.

Israel first participated in the competition in 1973, but Morocco participated once in 1980; Israel withdrew due to a religious holiday falling on the same evening, while Lebanon was also scheduled to enter a contest in 2005, but withdrew its lineup after being told it had to broadcast the entire event, including Israel’s participation.

We can say that these states boycotted Eurovision from the beginning due to Israel’s participation, but they were so consistent in their stance that almost no one noticed it.

However, the boycott of Eurovision by Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands marks a turning point in Eurovision history and creates a problem that may take years to resolve.

But the crisis may not be existential, given that there are few actual articles of faith specific to the singing competition’s start. Eurovision’s values ​​are the sum of the values ​​that the participating countries bring to the competition. And when the boycotting foursome return, they can give it new life.